February 09, 2018

I Do Hope There’ll Be Cake

Those of you who keep track of these things will know that today is this blog’s eleventh birthday. It’s not a round number, I know, but it is a tissue-thin pretext to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant for a while longer, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my new PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade or so, and in over 2,000 posts and 75,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. It’s the way we do things here. And do please join in.

I’ve found 3 that I enjoyed. One is Tales of the Orient, where you rebuild a destroyed village. (When I built them a giant lucky cat, I began to suspect they were taking shameless advantage of the foreign aid.). Secrets of Magic is a cute Halloween game. Snoopy Pop has you free those little yellow birds from “ Peanuts,” that are trapped in colored bubbles.

These 3 all have sonething in common: you can win. The several other match-3’s I tried and deleted all became so hard at about level 50 that they became tedious.

Regarding simple games, Bejewelled Blitz is one I used to enjoy before I left the FaceBorg. There's also Crush the Castle, which has blood (you use trebuchet's and varying forms of ammunition to knock down castles and kill all the residents...good clean fun!).

And then there's Vector TD, where alien things of differing properties run through a maze and the player sets up towers with different weapons platforms to blow up the baddies. The mazes go up in complexity as you progress.

Another account stood out due to the 'I love SMH' sticker: https://twitter.com/jennynoise . For those that don't know the SMH used to be a respectable broadsheet down here. A few years ago it switched to tabloid format and the content shortly followed suit. They are now nothing more than a progressive modern feminist blog with a thinly applied veneer of 'journalism' and as far as I can tell they just want to be The Grauniad. Their readership has plummeted along with the quality. They won't be missed.

My wife subscribed last year. I think the dissonance of a stay at home mother - whose extremely cushy lifestyle is only possible due to a member of the cishet white patriarchy - giving money to these right-on whingers was lost on her.

@Pogonip Australia is pretty good, although we're in a bit of a weird situation where we're both going too far down the US route (IMO) and have a noisy postmodern progressive crowd that is getting worse. But I think the populace as a whole are basically centrists who are not happy about either of those things.

I think it is probably one of the easiest places to live, if not the most exciting or interesting. And christ it's a long way from anywhere else you'd want to go.